[Unicode]  Adopt-a-Character
 

Choosing Characters

Over 136,000 Unicode characters to pick from

  • Over 130 scripts (alphabets), such as Latin or Cyrillic, Hindi or Thai. The largest is the Han script (used for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) with over 88,000 characters; you’ll find the other modern scripts too. And ancient scripts: if you’re a fan of Lord of the Rings, there are 86 Runic characters like ᚠ, or for fans of the Mummy, there are 1,071 Egyptian Hieroglyphs like 𓅓.
  • Over 750 punctuation characters, with some pretty exotic ones like ꧁ or ๛, but also the workhorses: ?, !, …
  • Over 1,500 numbers, not only 0-9, but also variants like ⓼—plus Roman numerals and even 𒑪.
  • Over 1,750 combining marks, like the umlaut ( ¨ )—if you’re fond of Häagen-Dazs or hëävÿ mëtäl.
  • Over 6,800 symbols, with game symbols like 🁷, ♜, 🀩, or ⛁; the full range of Braille (⠵); divination symbols like x; hundreds of musical symbols like 𝅘𝅥𝅲; and over a thousand math symbols like ∞ or ∰.
  • Over 2,600 emoji, with a wide variety of colored symbols: faces 🤓, creatures 👻, people 🕵, gestures 🖖, emotion 💘, apparel 🛍, animals 🐅, plants 🌹, food 🧀, drink ☕️, places 🏖, travel 🚂, weather 🌤, sports ⚽️, music 🎷, reading 📖, and many others. These also include the emoji sequences, such as keycaps 0️⃣, flags 🇨🇦, people with skin tones 💇🏾, and diverse families 👩‍👩‍👦.

How to find and enter them?

  • Windows. Go to Windows Accessories from the Start menu, and choose Character Map. Pick the character, then copy and paste into the Character to Adopt box.
  • Mac. Make sure the Character to Adopt box has your cursor in it. Use Command-Control-Space to get “Emoji & Symbols”. Pick and click to enter the character.
  • Hex Code. If you know the hex code for the character, you can also type or paste that into the Character to Adopt box. For example, type U+1F47B for 👻.

Online sources

  • Emoji. You can see all the emoji characters on these charts: Emoji Charts, Emoji Sequences (skin tones), Emoji ZWJ Sequences (diverse families).
  • PDF. You can see PDF charts for all Unicode characters at PDF Charts. Only use the Hex codes below the characters in these charts; copying characters won't work.
  • HTML. You can see HTML charts for all Unicode characters at HTML Charts. For these, you can copy either the characters or the Hex codes. However, you'll may need to install some fonts to see all the characters (check below).
  • Others. Wikipedia, Emojipedia, and other sites are also useful.

Notes

  • You can’t sponsor candidate characters (those not yet released in a version of Unicode, such as the Emoji Candidates), nor certain characters such as invisible ones.
  • Sponsorship is completely independent of proposals for new Unicode characters, such as for new Emoji.
  • In most cases, you'll already have fonts on your system for the character you want. But if not, you can get a wide range of fonts at Noto fonts.